Saturday, August 3, 2013

Stephen Ellis

Cornfield love and Neptunian flippers of Oz.
Dougie's mom's egg-blue Plymouth and the holes the dog dug in the
grass-less backyard. Dark scrub pine barrier to freedom facing west,
smell of pine tar so close it seemed to come from under my
eyelids.

Tune your radios to WQRZ.

The smell of the
Nile early in the morning, watching out the back staircase hotel
window a small man sweeping an empty, unpaved lot. Two rats moving
slowly along the back of a couch in a fifth-floor room just around
the corner from the Azjerbaijani embassy.

Gold teeth. I sold
my own last year for $110.

Roman numerals add false dignity to
both the sublime and the ridiculous.

Lucas Foss, solo piano
pieces. I am with him and them in the current ear that hears my head
in there. 15B Johnson Street, America AD, where the gas stove blew a
six-foot blue flame under my jean jacket, maggots writhed in the
trashed summer heat and windows were always wide open toward the
slaughter-house packing plant and the shouts of guys in slippers in
the street below trying to fix a car up on blocks.

From the
vantage of a hilltop Zarka parking spot, crowds of orange Iraqi taxis
are having gas supplies from clandestine extra tanks welded under
back seats drained off, their value to be swapped out in Amman for
medical supplies against the embargo. George Schultz was right:
People are smart. People everywhere are smart. People are smarter
where they live than any visitor could ever be. They are smarter than
you. All of you. Forever. The souped-up Plymouth Fury taxi runs from
Amman to Damascus all buy cut-rat gas from these guys. That was how I
ended up there.

Sun goes down from gold to grey and the desert
becomes a slope of tent. Arrive out of earth if you can find the help
to get you out. Live with the help you hire. Keep the smoke from
fragrant cooking fires somewhere near the tent flaps.

Birth is
how you end up with things to look at. The occasion of the open
moment hangs in no balance I can easily know. Live with it. Lived it.
Lost it. Out of it. What a relief.

Gypsy encampments in the No
Man's Land a kilometer in width between the official border Syria
with Jordan. Bright clothes will always steal across borders in the
night to steal a few cups of milk from local cows.

Milk adders
in the deserted milk house that was always cold whatever the outside
temperature, as if it were a sort of hell-mouth. Snakes have skin
like us, but not like ours.

Cottonmouths at Magnolia Lake in
among the remains of rotting boats. The years sound down to being
nestled and bristling in bright sun down in behind the police station
on the isle of Chios among the bleached and broken boats to see if I
could hear in the untucked sheets of mild surf the sounds that Homer
heard.

Salt to salt: “Are you guys married?”

Relationships
grow partly in secret, disclosed only as evidence in things made with
intent, where the accident of growth shows as surplus.

Bewitch
your pronouns and bracket your misses.

Wool fibers wetted,
pressed, beaten and dried out eventually bind together like Shiva's
hair and felt. “People” references in mythology can be to
landforms, events, territories, inclinations, objects, animals,
weather patterns, that is, rarely “you” and rarely “me” but
that we remember eye-holes and doorways: Our breathing pores.

When
your Messerschmidt crashes, go immediately for the felt. Human warmth
is the central quantity in the act of going down, coming down and
being down. If you don't believe me, look it up.

I wish my “e”
key worked better. Flaws are a kind of addiction.

Press the
needle flat against the vein like a thin head and neck in the crease
of a pillow to keep it from rolling and it will almost slide into
Eden by itself with a “pop” you can't hear even as well as those
seed pods that used to explode in the forest when your childhood came
too near in the attempt to propagate itself.

Dream on.

Bread,
hummus and fried bits of beef on near to midnight in Zameleck. Bob
said through the jungle underbrush of Bolinas that after 50, life is
lived as memory. Experience at that point is hunkering down behind
the dunes to watch a calm sea.

Hilary said forget about
counting and sequence: Begin instead by grouping fours, sixes and
nines. Peter recommended grouping by color and then making a cut to
make one of them bleed more intensely than the others.

There's
a rag in the treetops. No one knows how it got there.

Themes.
I hate them.

Dirt back road down behind the barn following
along brilliant marble graveyard to the deserted house that got
carried off on a flatbed truck in 1959. My father, if nothing else,
at least said he liked Handel's Water
Music,
which was coincidentally on the radio this morning. The house was
grey, and peeling. I sliced the palm of my hand open on a rusty tin
can lid in its front yard several hours after asking my sister
whether men in the Navy wore shorts. I wanted for nothing more than
to be authentic as a man imagined by a boy, and as
a boy. I
was wearing shorts at the time, and couldn't move my fingers because
of the gauze. The real question is, does the sea have a
gender?

Rescue me from slaughter and light snow. Just now out
of box out of closet back in mind from stack of papers set carefully
away for “later”: Gburek's Tiptoes.
Halliday's On
Birdsong Summit.
And I wonder if I still have a copy of Nick Lawrence's
Timeserver?

The
fifty-first sentence from Fifty
One Sentences coming from Patanjali's Samadhi-Pada
[ via Tom Meyer in 1996 ] is “So because this closing down closes
everything else off it takes the seeds from the depth of thought.”
On the back cover in my own hand: Go to Sharifiyya for bus and taxi,
Barbir/Kola for taxi alone.

The sap travels. “The driver
usually encounters his likeness on a billboard.” [ Tinker Greene
]

Tricky
Cad,
1959, by Jess. You're in luck, buddy. I'm Dick Tracy.

Star
Flower,
with cover and drawings by Billy Greene, whose Mom in one of them
says, “keep climbing, kid.” Three levels in Tantric Buddhism:
Body, speech, thought. Each presents the opportunity for a completely
novel solution. The collective mantra is that the days are all
different. Sprites go fragment in each “natural” sheaf of wheat.
That's the addiction of the Poet. To threads, replete with her and
their special derangements.

Hezbollah fighter in Ba'albeck,
dressed in checked flannel shirt of rural xenophobic caution, points
a gun at my head, yelling at me in Arabic to give him my camera. It
was a sunny day. People strolled by, with their Italian ices from the
vendor over by the graveyard. A lieutenant came out and questioned
me, and I assured him that I hadn't taken a picture of what turned
out to be the entrance of a secret Hezbollah miltary base. I still
have the photo of the guy with the gun, waving me off. When they let
me go, I didn't run and I didn't look back, even once. The bus was
late. Quivering in fear at dusk is interesting, but only as aftermath
in consideration of a safe house.

Valium is a non-prescription
item in Lebanon.

The neon sign said OPEN. It still does. The
horror of the shimmering gas in that tube is the assimilated basis of
prayer.

The form of change that is unchanging: It begins to
look a lot like monotony and corruption from here. My ex-wife once
said that fucking the same guy for too long (“forever” was her
exact word) began to feel like incest after a while. And at Orly in
Paris, she hit me over the head with her bag because the plane was
delayed, then, in exhaustion, flopped down on our luggage and refused
to move until it was certain that we had missed our flight.